One fact, end to end

When a sentence on this site carries a small mark that opens a source, that mark stands for a chain, and you can walk it. It runs from the claim to the source it rests on, then to what that source says in its own words, and finally to the copy of that source kept on disk. This deep dive walks one real claim all the way down, so you can see exactly what a citation here is made of.

The claim

Dr S. J. Halbertsma was a Rotterdam physician¹, and in this story he appears as a client of the corner's furniture firm. By Royal Decree of 15 September 1920, number 37, he was made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau². The finding is confirmed, and it makes a good walk because nothing about it is in dispute: the honour, its date and its decree number are all on open public record.

What the source says, and what we make of it

The claim rests on the official government gazette, the Nederlandsche Staatscourant, in its issue of 17 and 18 September 1920. Under its standing heading of appointments and pensions, the decree takes up a single printed line:

That is the source, word for word³. We keep our reading of it separate, and it is plain. The gazette is the state's own primary record of its own act, and it prints the decree's number and date verbatim, so the appointment itself carries no uncertainty at all. The reading beside the scan says exactly that and no more: a late-career honour, with nothing inferred beyond what the line says.

The document, kept

Beneath the source lies the thing itself. The full page of the gazette is preserved as a file on disk, with a checksum that changes if the file changes. The checksum identifies the bytes we hold and used for this reading. On its own, it does not prove that every future copy or display is unchanged.

An older kind of chain

Some findings on this site hold their support less tightly, and the contrast is worth seeing. We are just as certain who drew the building's 1899 plans: he was Nicolaas Tinbergen, head of the firm named as the builder⁴. Several documents place him there: an address book, a jubilee notice, an 1892 birth register that enters him as architect at the builder's own address, and his signature matched to his own hand⁵. The finding is confirmed and fully visible. What it does not yet have is a single structured block setting out exactly what each of those documents says, as the gazette line has for Halbertsma. It is carried in the older, looser way, with its proof spread across several documents held separately instead of drawn together into one.

What a citation is not

One last point should be settled. The site also draws diagrams, builds a graph of who connects to whom, and lists which claim leans on which source. Where it sets two documents side by side, that comparison is a figure we assembled, not a document in its own right. All of these help you find your way through the material, and they are useful, but none of them is the proof. The chain of proof ends at the preserved document. If a generated aid and that document disagree, the discrepancy must be reviewed and corrected, never hidden behind the cleaner-looking view.